Flipkart ropes in Ravi Garikipati to create high impact projects, scale up ads

Flipkart ropes in Ravi Garikipati to create high impact projects, scale up ads

India's largest e-commerce venture Flipkart has appointed IT industry veteran Ravi Garikipati in a newly created position - entrepreneur in residence.

In this role, Garikipati will be working closely with co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal besides chief of operations Mukesh Bansal (all unrelated to each other) on new and high impact business projects. His first assignment will be to help Flipkart scale up its new ads initiative, the company said.

Garikipati, who holds a masters in software engineering and management from the BITS, Pilani, , comes with over 25 years of hands-on experience in building and leading global products and businesses.

Before joining Flipkart, he was president of innovation labs at US-based customer engagement and sales analytics firm [24]7 Customer Inc. Before joining [24]7 in 2009, he was senior vice president & managing director of Vendio, a large third party e-commerce service provider for small businesses. Under him, Vendio grew to have more than 2 million online sellers. Prior to that, he held various senior engineering leadership positions at IBM and Oracle where he led technology initiatives in building scalable enterprise software architectures and services.

"Ravi's experience in leading 24X7 innovation labs and Vendio makes him a valuable addition to Flipkart. This is the first time such a role is being created in the organization and the possibilities that open up for the future as a result of this are immense," Sachin Bansal, CEO and co-founder, Flipkart, said.

The company has been aggressively expanding its top team of late.

In March, it roped in Saikiran Krishnamurthy from McKinsey as the COO of its commerce division, which in effect, makes him the number two man looking after day to day activities of the e-commerce firm under Mukesh Bansal.

The organisation also re-jigged its top team with Sachin Bansal now looking after new initiatives and strategy, Binny Bansal is heading supply chain and logistics while Mukesh Bansal has been heading the day-to-day operations of the firm.

Mukesh Bansal got into the firm after Flipkart acquired Myntra, a venture co-founded by him, last year.